After a year living in a vegetable oil powered Volkswagen and one and a half years living in the Mojave desert Chantale is finally in Japan for her art exhibition. The Saga continues...

Friday, April 27, 2007

Brooklyn

I'm so glad to be here but just now when I looked around I got a little depressed. I'm in a coffeeshop (Atlas at Grand and Havemeyer) and everyone is drinking their coffees from paper cups, some even have plastic lids on them! Didn't any of these people get the memo? The Glaciers are melting!! My friend Hermann just emailed me from Belgium and he said it is 30 degrees celsius, (86 fahrenheit) in APRIL! Wig said it's going to be 90 degrees fahrenheit (32 celsius) in San Francisco this weekend. In SAN FRANCISCO. It was chilly throughout most of the south the entire time I was there! Do you need Time magazine to tell you that Global climate change is real? Do people think that the need to conserve energy and resources applies to others and not to them? I just asked the man next to me, who has a Greenpeace sticker on his laptop, why he is drinking his coffee from a paper cup. He said "Because that's what she gave me." I informed him that like most coffee shops, they have very nice ceramic mugs here and he may choose to ask for one in the future.

Today I ate lunch in Manhattan at my favorite Korean buffet and I talked to an employee about the over-use of disposable packaging. I was asking if it's possible to order food on a plate instead of from a styrofoam container and unfortunately, it is not, so I said it was too bad because I would eat there all the time if I could order food on a real plate. Normally I bring my own take out containers but today I didn't have them so I used a styrofoam plate. Although unappetizing and wasteful, the food was delicious, next time I will remember to bring my containers.

Things have gotten to the point that I cannot keep myself from saying something anymore. I can't tell you how much I hold my tongue when I see people in grocery stores putting an individual piece of fruit in a plastic bag or putting plastic and paper in the trash. I could rant on this all day but for now i'm just going to ask you to read this portion of an article about plastic, scroll down to the part about the environment.

Here are some other links to check out, if the information you read gets you down call me, because it gets me down too.